With the increasing availability of television programming, cable services, Internet programming, and other interactive entertainment services, there is an ever greater need for the ability to control and manage content of programming. Users desire to be able to more easily and effectively choose the types of television programs to which they and/or their children are exposed.
In some existing “parental control systems,” such as those associated with V-chip technology or Electronic Program Guides (EPGs), users may block all programs having particular ratings and content attributes. For instance, a user may block all programs having a rating of “TV-MA” (Mature) or all programs having the content attribute for “Violence.” When a program with blocked ratings or content attributes appears, both its video and audio are blocked for the entire duration of the program unless the user enters a personal identification number (PIN) to unblock it. With such existing systems, ratings and content attributes are generalized for the entire program and rarely change. As a result, blocking is an “all or nothing” affair because either all of the program is blocked or none of it is blocked. This is a disadvantage if the ratings or content attributes apply to only a small part of the entire program.
For instance, if a program contains a brief scene of nudity and the user blocked all programs with “Nudity,” the entire program would be blocked even if the scene in question was only a few seconds in length. There would be no way to selectively block just that portion of the program. A good example of this is the movie “Titanic.” After Titanic's release, a small firm began editing from Titanic a love scene between the two main characters. There was an enormous demand for this version of Titanic among parents and other users who did not desire to see that particular scene, but did wish to view the other portions of the movie.
Even if parental control systems could block a portion of the program by briefly changing the program's ratings or content attributes or by changing the data being provided to the V-chip during a program, there would be no way to block just the video or just the audio portion of the program. For instance, if a program contained a few seconds of adult language, the ratings and/or content attributes data would be unable to instruct the parental control system to block only the audio for that period of time. As a result, both video and audio would always be blocked together.
Furthermore, existing parental control systems are also limited to completely disabling the audio or video. In other words, existing parental control systems cannot modify the video or audio in any way. For instance, if a program contains adult language, the ratings/content data cannot instruct the parental control system to switch to an alternative audio track containing a G-rated version of the dialog.
A better approach would be to make the ratings and/or content data vary during the course of the program. An even better approach would be to provide additional data to indicate whether the video, audio, or both video and audio portion of the program should be blocked. Additionally, the data could indicate ways in which to modify the video or audio portion of the program to make it acceptable for the current parental control settings.